(3 of 4)
"The heroism of our people, their self-sacrifice, their contempt for death — this is the main theme. This is truth."
The Days of Hate. Another important thing to remember in assessing current Russian literature is that every Russian writer has taken part in the war in a very real sense. Much more than our polemicists on the Writers' War Board, much more than our warriors of the Office of War Information, more even than most of our war correspondents (certainly than those in Moscow), the Russian writer has been in & out of the war. And this is not just correspondents: it is poets, writers of the most tender lyrics, historians — all of them.
One cannot exaggerate the mark left on Soviet writing by the terrible months of reverses in 1941, right up until the battle for Moscow was won. In those months the writers became so closely identified with the very courage and determination which has finally beaten Hitler back that they all developed muscular, bitter, mystical, adjectival writing styles, which they still employ in the sweeter days of triumph. Those were the days when Simonove wrote Wait For Me — the words of a soldier to his wife: Wait for me, wait very hard —Never give up hope, even if they all say I am dead; Do not believe it, but wait for me.
Above all, those were the days when hate was born. As Nicolai Tikhanov of the Writers' Union says: "In the course of cruel battle grew a hatred of the Germans — a heavy hatred, an indistinguishable hatred, a personal hatred, a hatred which still moves the Red Army and the Soviet people forward." On June 23, 1942, Mikhail Sholokhov wrote a terrific news paper story called The School of Hate, setting the pitch for the hate propaganda, of which Ilya Ehrenburg became the strident genius. The Russian people still feel that hatred and are very much afraid that the British and the Americans may be "sentimental" toward the Germans. The writers still feel and express the hatred.
These things have been responsible for a literary style for which there is a Russian word: Agitka, something to agitate the people and make them act.
The Writers. In my opinion, one man stands above and apart from all these things. He is Mikhail Sholokhov, the nearest approach to a man of genius in Russia's great tradition. The author of And Quiet Flows the Don and The Soil Upturned stays in his native village of Veshenskaya and writes. He does not come to Moscow to spend the writers' tremendous royalties and reap his great honors. He refuses to become the president of the Writers' Un ion, because he is too busy — writing. He writes for no censorship except truth as he sees it. He is just now putting the finishing touches to his new novel, They Fought for Their Country. Sholokhov gets his heroic effect by indirection. He does not find it necessary to rant or repeat cliches of patriotism. He writes what seems to me to be the truth about soldiers. He says: "How much does a man need in time of war? To get a little farther away from death than usual, to rest, to have a good sleep and eat his fill, to get a letter from home, and to have a leisurely smoke with his friends; there you have all that goes to make up the quickly maturing happiness of a soldier."